9 Stories You Should Know About Today: Friday, Feb. 6

News throughout the day on the anticipated storm, expected to produce flash floods and power outages. Full story

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan, are donating $75 million to San Francisco General Hospital to help fund critical equipment and technology for the new public hospital, which is scheduled to open at the end of the year. The donation to the San Francisco General Hospital Foundation, the hospital’s fundraising arm, is expected to be announced Friday. It is the largest single gift to the hospital since the foundation’s creation in 1994, and hospital officials believe it is the largest single private gift from individuals to a public hospital in the nation. Full story

Excited sea ducks and shorebirds leapt into the water Wednesday as the International Bird Rescue Center released its third batch of waterfowl. The birds started turning up in San Francisco Bay in mid-January, coated in a sticky gray gunk. Three weeks later investigators are still trying to figure out what the mystery material is. It’s not for lack of effort. State scientists, federal agencies and a lab in Britain are all trying to identify the substance. To get a behind-the-scenes look at the forensic science involved, I drove to the state’s Fish and Wildlife lab to find out why it’s taking so long. Full story

Something strange has happened inside Alameda County garbage cans, and it has sounded an alarm for those working against climate change. Residents apparently hit a wall last year in separating kitchen food scraps from their garbage cans, seriously slowing a yearslong trend that became standard with curbside pickup across the county in 2008. Full story

The San Francisco deputy public defender who was arrested at the Hall of Justice for allegedly obstructing police filed a misconduct complaint Thursday against the city officers who handcuffed her when she questioned why they were photographing one of her clients outside a courtroom. Attorney Jami Tillotson took her case to the civilian Office of Citizen Complaints after Police Chief Greg Suhr told the Police Commission late Wednesday that the department will not pursue charges against her. Suhr apologized “for any distress Ms. Tillotson suffered as a result of her detention,” but he stood by the actions of Sgt. Brian Stansbury and the other officers who arrested the lawyer. Full story

A frightening number of sick and starving sea lion pups are turning up on California beaches this year, leaving scientists struggling to explain a third deadly winter for the pinnipeds. Rescuers from San Diego to San Francisco Bay in January netted more than 250 frail pups, mostly 7-month-olds that should be nursing with their mothers in the Channel Islands or Mexico, not wallowing on the California mainland. Full story

Researchers have built a new map of entrepreneurial "hot spots" in California and pinpoint the San Francisco Bay Area -- Silicon Valley, in particular -- as birthing more successful startups than anywhere else in the state. Startups in Menlo Park, Mountain View, Palo Alto and Sunnyvale have 20 times the average quality of the median and 90 times that of the lowest-ranked cities in California, according to the analysis, published in Friday's issue of the journal Science. Full story

It is no secret that San Francisco's black population has been in steep decline in recent years. Whatever the cause, it is also no secret that the cost of living has spiked and a whiter, more affluent populace has increasingly made The City home. This demographic shift is also having a troubling effect in the courtroom, as black residents have all but disappeared from jury pools. Full story

Twitter Inc. has struck a deal with Google Inc. to make its 140-character updates more searchable online. In the first half of this year, tweets will start to be visible in Google’s search results as soon as they’re posted, thanks to a deal giving the Web company access to Twitter’s firehose, the stream of data generated by the microblogging service’s 284 million users, people with knowledge of the matter said Wednesday. Google previously had to crawl Twitter’s site for the information, which will now be visible automatically. Full story